Beneath flickering tents in the carnival’s grime,
The Blade-Eater dazzled, his peril sublime;
He feasted on sabers, on razors and steel,
A hunger for pain none but he could feel.

The Illustrated Lady was tapestried dusk—
Her skin wore her secrets in emerald and musk;
Each swirl and each serpent, each memory lost,
Inscribed as reminders of heartache’s true cost.

They met in the quiet where sawdust is strewn,
Past fortune’s false prophets and under the moon;
She’d touch his scarred hands with a trembling embrace,
Reading the stories his wounds left un-erased.

He ached to unravel the shadowed depths she’d concealed,
To decipher each symbol her silence never revealed;
But steel cannot soften, nor ink touch a blade,
And desire cuts deeper than secrets betrayed.

By dawn, every costume and mask is relinquished,
Yet scars linger on when the revellers have finished;
She learns all the afflictions he dare not confess,
He unspools her silence in each soft caress.

Behind velvet curtains where bare selves reside,
Steel cannot comfort, and ink cannot hide;
Their wounds—praised in public, in private, remain:
He carves through the torment that tattoos her pain.

Though sadness is inked, their anguish made real,
Their love scripts what neither time nor suffering can steal;
For even in carnivals, misfits are shadowed by disdain,
Yet their hearts write new verses that break sorrow’s chains.